"When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, 'OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?'"

If anything, I think I probably exercise my technical expertise more as an engineering manager than I did as a principal engineer, but that’s probably a matter of difference in company culture and my current team. Generally I think both roles end up leaning on a mix of systems thinking, interpersonal skills, and generally the ability to have a vision and sell it to other people. As a principal engineer I was focused on the technical systems and the vision was about ways to make the organization I was working in more effective by setting a vision for what areas we invested in technically, how systems owned by different teams worked together, and in some cases involved getting hands on to help out or build a prototype.

As a manager I’m focused on an area of the product, business outcomes, and how to ensure that my team is productive over both a short and longer time horizon. It means setting a product vision, understanding the technical and organizational work needed to get there, and selling that vision to get the time and resources needed. Sometimes it means getting my hands dirty to build a prototype, or to take things off my team’s plate so they can be more effective.

I’ve been lucky that my recent jobs have all had enough interesting deep technical problems to go around and I’ve still been able to do some of that work, but neither role has involved the kind if regular deep technical work I had as a senior IC.

I think real senior roles are generally the place with the hardest technical problems, and moving up in any direction sets aside some of those problems in favor of learning to get leverage from influence.